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The Literary and Literal Circulation of Amelia Curran's Portrait of Percy

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The Literary and Literal Circulation of Amelia Curran's Portrait of Percy Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of 1-1-2008 The Literary and Literal Circulation of Amelia Curran’s Portrait of Percy Shelley Diane Hoeveler Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 39, No. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2008): 27-30. Publisher link. © 2008 Boston University Editorial Institute. Used with permission. The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curran's Portrait of Percy Shelley Diane Long Hoeveler Marquette University Heniy James's noveUa The Aspern Papers (1888; rev. line Clairmont in Florence and in supposed possession of 1908) has typically been read as a critical examination of the some priceless Shelley letters (cf. Stocking). At almost the literary scholar's obsession with the mystery of creativity (Per- same time he also heard about a conversation with the son). There are numerous autobiographical resonances to Countess Camba, a relative of Lord Byron's last mistress, the James's own life in the tale, for instance, his interest in Countess Teresa Camba Guiccioli, who confessed that she Ptishkin, Walt Whitman, Julian Hawthorne, and Constance had destroyed at least one scandalotis letter exchanged be- Fenimore Woolson (cf. Tambling; ; O'Leary; Edel; tween Byron and Teresa. As James noted after hearing these Scharnhorst). But this essay will focus instead on the strange anecdotes, "I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past— afterlives of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks in The Aspern Papers. Presented as a famous American poet and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a from New York and once the beloved of the now elderly long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own daughter of a prominent American portrait painter, the por- table" (x). Grasping the personal histories of both Shelley trait of the ghostly Jeffrey Aspern—not his papers—is the and Byron from the near past as if they were objects on a central and haundng object of desire in the story. One of table allowsjames to place them also within our imaginative the most memorable images after reading the story is that grasps, and, more importantly, he seems to be privileging the beaudful disembodied male head, called a "relic" by the nar- need to come to terms with the literaiy heritage of "Romanti- rator, that has circulated from its original and very private cism" with a capital R. What Jarries has created in this work is storage place in Jtiliana's pocket (93) into the pocket of the an enactment of the obsessive power of literary and scholarly narrator after Juliana's death (131) and fmally to its ultimate desire, as if those fedshized and dead male Romande poets, relocadon in a public place of honor above the narrator's laid out on a dissecting table, can be grasped, seized, and wridng desk (143). James intended this portrait to be resurrected as love objects, not by their discarded female par- modeled on Amelia Curran's painting of Percy Shelley, com- amours, but by the masculine literary tradition itself. pleted in Rome in 1819, a portrait that was so well known that it had asstimed iconic and almost religious status by the It is fair to observe, however, that in discussing The As- dme James was writing his novella [http://www.xs4all.nl/ pern Papers there have been a few errors and oversights made ~androom/biography/i002657.htm]. Depicted sitting with a by James scholars, a tistially metictilotis group of people. long quill pen in his beautifully shaped hand, the portrait of Throughout the criticism, Claire has been erroneotisly re- Shelley was an idealized representation of masctiline poetic ferred to as Percy Shelley's "second wife," as well as Maiy creativity, of the highly feminized male poet in love not with Shelley's cousin, her sister, or her half-sister (Edel 337; Per- human bodies btit with the ideas of art and beauty. son, 30). In fact, James himself makes this mistake (vii), but Claire was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Jane Clairmont, That portrait of Shelley becomes a heavily coded a woman who was living next door to William Godwin when homosocial exchange object, triangulated within the story by he became the widower of Mary Wollstonecraft and the fa- a series of convoluted negotiations between two women and ther to both their two-week old daughter, Mary, and Woll- a man (Juliana, Tina, and the narrator), or two men and a stonecraft's illegitimate daughter, the three-year-old Fanny woman (Juliana's father the artist, Juliana, and Aspern). The Imlay. Mrs. Clairmont, as she called herself, had never mar- earlier historical incident on which the story is based was also ried and yet she had a son and datighter, paternity tinknown triangtilated in multiple ways: for instance, by Byron, Shelley, (presumably not to her). Godwin was desperate for a care- and Claire Clairmont; or Byron, Claire and Allegra, their taker for his two daughters and Mary Jane Clairmont found daughter; or Mary Shelley, Percy, and Claire; or Percy, Claire, herself in the right place at the right time. In fact, shortly and possibly their mysterious daughter. In short. The Aspern after their marriage Mary Jane gave birth to Godwin's only Papers is about how desire circulates in families and by exten- son and namesake, William, a name used later for the tin- sion culttires, or specifically, how the act of creating cultural lucky younger brother of Victor Frankenstein and, of cotirse, prodticts and their residue, objects, actually short-circuits fa- the first victim killed by Frankenstein's creature. So much milial desire, prodticing a strange substittite-formation, the for Mary Shelley's attitude toward her step-siblings. The fact scholarly artifact—wbetber papers or portrait—as that Claire and Mary grew up in the same large and fairly homosocial fetishized exchange object. chaodc household did not make them sisters or cousins. Le- gally, they were stepsisters, but Mary had contempt for Mrs. The originating anecdote that James heard and that Clairmont and she spent her life bitterly regretting the tie motivated his writing of the story is based on his learning that she had with Claire, who saw Mary as a sexual and intellecttial Claire Clairmont had recently been living with her niece Pau- competitor (Gittings and Mantón). 27 Part two of this family romance occurs when Mary God- Notice how the portrait—representing a visual presen- win began having an affair with the married and very promis- tation of the idealized and bodiless male poet—functions in ing young poet Percy Shelley. Like some eerie doppelganger, opposition to Aspem's papers—or the literal and factual— Claire was compelled to seek out an even more popular and throughout the story. In order to make my case that the por- also married poet. Lord Byron, and to begin an affair with trait of Aspern is intended by James to recall to his contem- him. As Mary became pregnant with Percy's lovechild, so did porary readers the portrait of Percy Shelley, I shall trace the Claire after four months become pregnant with Byron's public circulation of Amelia Curran's painting. The National child, giving ¡birth to a daughter named Allegra, a child who Portrait Gallery (London) has seven portraits of Shelley, in- survived onlyi until her fifth birthday (Grylls). Byron stepped cluding the 1819 Curran oil painting, the Edward Williams's in shortly after the birth of Allegra and claimed his rights as a watercolor [http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/index.htmPbi- father, taking the child away from Claire and eventually plac- ography/p000047.htm] and the oil by George Clint, "after ing her in a convent outside of Ravenna where she died from Amelia Curran, and Edward Ellerker Williams," known as the typhus, most likely brought on by neglect (Holmes, 420-23; composite portrait (ca. 1829). The Clint paindng [http:// 439-49). www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portList.asp?search=sp&sText= percy+shelley] seems like a "better" portrait than Curran's, with more detail and facial definidon. Mary Shelley appar- Part three of the Claire Clairmont story, however, was endy tried to commission an improved version of the Curran the subject of the most notorious gossip throughout Claire's in 1829, requesting a composite of the Curran and the Wil- life. In 1815, and again when they all lived together in Ge- liams portraits (Trelawny's Preface to his Recollections; White; neva, Byron, .Claire, and the Shelleys were rumored to be en- Smith; Barker-Benfield). The earliest public appearance of a gaged in a "league of incest," the four of them randomly copy of the Curran portrait occurred in the ornate frontis- intimate with each other, with Robert Southey only too will- piece of the Galignani brothers' edition of The Poetical Works ing to spread the tale far and wide. Even more shocking, of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (Paris, 1829), containing bust- however, in January 1819, Percy Shelley appeared in a Nea- length likenesses of all three poets. Mary Shelley used a dif- politan courthouse with an infant girl and without his wife in ferent, waist-length derivation of the Gurran portrait as the order to take out birth papers for a baby that he named frontispiece to her edition of Shelley's Poetical Works (Moxon, Elena Adelaide and who he claimed was his own. This myste- 1839). Another source wherejames might have seen a vari- rious action has long puzzled Shelley biographers as Mary ant of the Curran portrait can be found in the third edition did not give birth to a child at this dme and both she and of Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources (1859), edited by Claire destroyed their journals for the six months prior to the Mary Shelley's daughter-in-law Lady Jane Shelley.
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